Spokesperson: 'Largest and most sustained attack' in WordPress' six-year history

Below:

Next story in Security

The blogging site WordPress is currently being hit by a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The attack is "affecting connectivity" for many of WordPress’ more than 25 million bloggers, Sara Rosso of Automattic, which owns WordPress, told Sophos.

"The size of the attack is multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second. We are working to mitigate the attack, but because of the extreme size, it is proving rather difficult," Rosso wrote.

DDoS attacks occur when networks of hijacked computers called botnets gang up to overload a target with Web traffic. It is not known who is responsible for the attack on WordPress.

In an e-mail to CNET, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg said the DDoS attack affected WordPress data centers in Chicago, San Antonio and Dallas and is the "largest and most sustained attack" in WordPress' six-year history.

Mullenweg said the attack "may have been politically motivated against one of our non-English blogs," but that had not been confirmed.